I am an evil giraffe. But I'm trying, Nick. I'm trying REAL HARD to be the wizard.

GURPS Witch World has been something of a Holy Grail for me; it was one of the few books that I didn’t have from the Third Edition*. Needless to say, Amazon makes collecting this stuff easy, right? (more…)

Heh. Something like this happened to me: to wit, like Tycho of Penny Arcade, in my house, growing up, AD&D was specifically banned.

… my mom gave me an incredible gift here that almost certainly informed my life. I think a lot of people go right to D&D, and that’s it. You can play Dungeons & Dragons your whole life, I’m not gonna tell you that would be bad. It is at least as good and probably better than a lot of the shit you get up to. But she didn’t let me start with it, and the reason doesn’t matter now. I was made to cast a wide net, and I hauled up treasure.

But, like Tycho… my mom just banned AD&D. MERP/Rolemaster? No problem. Car Wars? OK. GURPS? Sure, no worries. …Paranoia? Fine, although Orcbusters pushed my mom’s buttons. I suspect that a lot of gamers have that history; and the members of the gaming industry that aren’t working for Wizards of the Coast should be, frankly, properly grateful about it.

…I’m finding it surprisingly hard to find a source for Mark III and V minis. I mean, yes, they’re out of stock. So I’m not going to find find them hither and yon and at stock price. But I ain’t seeing them, period.

Weird.

Moe Lane

PS: I’ll have what I need for the game, mind you. Got a basic command post/defenders setup for one side and will have an Ogrethulhu for the other, if nothing else. Actually, I’ll end up with two of those. But the lead, man. The lead calls to you…

…Gaming shelf. Heh. Try gaming bookcases: between my gaming books and my wife’s, the living room is a homage to the 20′ by 20′ room with an orc and a chest.

Anyway, just got my copy of GURPS Low-Tech, thus bringing me fully up to date on the actual print runs of 4th ed. Really, at some point I should run a game in this system (the problem is that I can think in 3rd ed, but not quite in 4th ed)…

The Difference Engine was one of the first alt-history/steampunk books that I ever read; and it pretty much gave me a permanent taste for both. I suspect that the maps help: I love alternate history maps.

I’ll be happy when November hits and I don’t feel quite the same urgency about political blogging, either. Alas, this is the busy season for that sort of thing; although I actually had a GURPS thought for the first time in months the other day*…

How long has the GURPS community waited for GURPS Vorkosigan Saga? Let me put it this way: the editor started off his acknowledgment by apologizing for the delay. This roleplaying game sourcebook was in production for five years. There were probably bets made on when, if ever, this book would ever see the light of day. The only reason why all of this didn’t end in a frontal assault on Steve Jackson Games is that Bujold fans tend to be kind-hearted souls without access to kinetic energy weapons.

…I kid. This book was a bit of a Jonah; everything that could have gone wrong did go wrong, and after a certain point you have to accept that sometimes that just happens. And it’s nice to have a copy in hand. But man, was this a wait.

One of the funniest things that was in the original GURPS Autoduel was its suggestion that the dystopian future of that world’s 2020s would portray the 1980s as being idyllic (in much the same way that we romanticize both the 1950s and the 1890s). It’s still funny (nobody gets near-future disaster scenarios wrong like roleplaying games do*), but not because it isn’t increasing true that we do.

Moe Lane

*Which is not the games’ fault, really: if you’re playing in a near-future game, you want it to be different than the current time period, right? That means “exciting,” and exciting means that something’s probably blown up somewhere. Or lots of somethings. Whatever the current worry is, really.